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Google News Removes Belgian Newspaper
CaVi writes "Following a judicial action (link in French) by the 'French-speaking Belgian Association of the press,' Google.be has removed all the French-speaking press sites from its index, as can be seen by doing a search. The court order to Google is posted at Chilling Effects.
In summary, the editors want a cut of the profit that Google News makes using their information. No such deal exists for the moment. Google has been ordered to remove all references, or pay one million Euros per day if it doesn't comply. Net effect: they removed all link to the sites, from Google News, but also from Google's search. Will Google become irrelevant in Belgian, and be replaced by MSN? Or will the newspapers, which gain from commercials, and thus net traffic, change their position when they'll see the drop in traffic that it is causing?" There's also a link to a Dutch news article on the subject; one of the key issues was evidently that some of what Google was carrying was no longer available on the newspaper's website itself, so rather then linking to the newspaper, Google was displaying it on their own.
No linking. Gotta love it. Undermind the damn net! Undermine I say!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Someone "out there" is taking the piss, right? I once visited Belgium for three weeks and it became apparent quite quickly that there wasn't anything news-worthy going on. All they seem to have is really, really excellent beer.
I am more concerned with the over inclusion of "news" sites. The news feature on Google has been flooeded with blogs and other "new" media sources. I enjoy reading blogs, but they are often so scewed to the blogger's opinion that they need some additional context. I realize that mainstream media is often accused of bias as well, but at least I know who those stations are. The news feature is useless to me if I need to get past 200 blogs to find one legitimate source.
Google should block the Newspaper's IP addresses so that their reporters cannot use Google in their research.
As the old challenge goes, name 10 famous Belgians. Nice country and all but not exactly news central. In effect this is like Des Moines doing the same, and not even people in Des Moines would mind if they just had OTHER peoples news.
Maybe its the start of something, all really dull places will sue to have their very dull news removed. After all, if something interesting happens there then one of the majors will cover it.
$1m a day... nice sense of perspective.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Excellent suggestion. Imagine? Reciprocity...
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
There's no such thing as a language called 'Belgian.'
/.er's grasp on geography AND foreign languages.
They speak Dutch (Flemish), French, and German.
I sometimes wonder about the average
Don't just game, Dungeoneer
Belguim is irrelevant anyway. Now that we can't find it through Google, it will quietly disappear in the back of the wardrobe, lost between Tanganyika and Cluj-Napoca.
Syncerus
"Man is nothing without the works of man" -- Helvetius
Belgians do not speak Belgian. They speak either French or a dialect of Dutch known as Flemish.
, 00.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1604253
KFG
Stupid Flanders...
End transmission.
I think not for Google. It is funny.. that the newspapers don't keep their content, but are offended when somebody else picks up the ball for them.
In reality, there is value to keeping articles around, and I really wish that newspapers would take the initiative and do a better job with that.
Regardless, this is unfortunate. Perhaps the companies should just keep the articles around... and then they could make all this "money that google is making from the articles" for themselves.
Justin - Don't be afraid of my blog, it won't bite.
By the way - I'm assuming the submitter meant "Will Google become irrelevent in Belgium" not the entire language, though the average /.er's grasp on geography makes me wonder sometimes.
... complicated, politically.
Belgium is a country with three official languages and three main regions - the Flemish-speaking Flanders (6 million people), the French-speaking Wallonia (3.3 million people) and the mostly-French-speaking, officially-bilingual capital Brussels (1 million people). Plus to add to the fun, there are 70,000 German-speakers in the east of the country.
There are some pretty harsh rivalries between the currently-financially-stable Flanders and the recession-hit Wallonia - it's impressive that the country hasn't split apart already. The situation is
But then Belgium's really dull and nothing happens here, right? I know otherwise, because I live here.
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
at least i live in the states, where you can't just sue companies because you are too dense to learn the rules (such as robots.txt)
oh wait..
-- lol pwned
This is not entirely clear, but it seems Google is abusing their near monopoly on search to strong arm their position in a new market of News.
The last numbers I saw placed Google as having about 45% of the search market. That isn't even in the running for being a monopoly.
Their have been ordered to remove other peoples news from their news service, and have decided to additional punish the source by also removing them from the search index.
As far as I can tell, there is no way in which this ruling applies to news.google.com that does not apply equally to google.com search. If one is ruled illegal by the courts, the other is probably just as illegal, so it makes sense to remove them from both.
I really thing Google should be allowed to link any news together in a news service, but escalating the issue to searching is really abusive and something I am quite sure they will be punished for in Europe. (Besides the obvious fact that it IS EVIL).
If Google had a monopoly, this could be an antitrust issue, but I've seen no evidence of that. There are a lot of players in the search market and Google has instituted absolutely no lock-in of any kind. Nothing stops Belgians from moving to something else, aside from the fact that the others tend to be lower quality. I don't foresee any antitrust action against them for this, nor any grounds for it. Since they don't wield monopoly influence in the market, I don't see how this is "evil."
The GPL isn't quite so assholic as that. They don't necessarily have to give out the source themselves. They simply have to either make the source available at no extra charge or tell people where you can get it (though, this third party source must provide it for free and the source must be the same as you used for your binary). This is why it's quite common for people to put up patches and tell people to get the standard tarball and patch it (see udpcast for an example concerning busybox). When's the last time you could use Google's cache to find a GPL'd binary but couldn't Google up the source?
The bottom line is that any creative work is copyrighted such that only the "author" can authorise copies. Google is depending on authors not enforcing their rights against them to prevent them from making numerous copies (and from providing a service to provide those copies to anyone with Google cache). If I was to setup a site which simply allowed visitors to search (and download) all the binaries online would Linus/FSF/Microsoft not be justified in challenging me for illegally distributing their copyrighted works?
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
I'm literally sick of all this people who don't like being indexed. If you don't want to show up in google, adjust robots.txt so that google won't search it. This is not a problem of "companies entering into your house because you left the door opened". Web sites are supposed to be there to be visited, if you don't like being indexed use robots.txt
If I understand this correctly, the principal problem is not Google News but rather Google Cache. It seems that when news articles move from public to subscriber-only, Google retrieved the contents from its cache, instead of removing the article. So the issue was that Google was distributing articles instead of only linking them.
The problem was that the newssite of French and German speaking Belgium had articles indexed by google (I believe it's about Le Soir), and that didn't pose any problem.
They changed the way the articles were accessible and made a "pay to view"-service, yet google had cached the newsarticles offering them "for free" (as the previously were offered publicly for free)
The problem for them was in how Google had a cache of something that wasn't free anymore, violating their copyright.
The link to the article on vrtnieuws as a Belgian newssite is misleading as vrtnieuws is a Flemish (Dutch speaking) newssite. In the audio fragment the interviewer wonders wherever it's not "good publicity" to have google link to your content and the specialist agrees with that how newssites "like" that, but explains the articles didn't link back to the website to the updated or removed content which posed the problem: their content being cached, freely accessable when they charged for it, and no link back to their webpage.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
Yes, but the poster makes an important point. google.be is blocking the sites, but google.com is not. google.fr is not either.
.fr instead. It would be different if Google were removing lesoir.be and other sites from all searches (including google.com searches) by computers with Belgian IP addresses, but are they? If not, Belgians will probably switch to google.fr/.com rather than MSN.
.be. Could it be because .be servers are actually in Belgium, and thus are somehow legally affected? That's the only way I can think of that this block makes sense.
It seems like the block has no practical effect, since you can find everything by going to google.com or
I don't know why they did this for
If you all Google Slashdot, will it Slashdot Google?
Agreed - editors are the one thing why sites like slashdot are worthwhile compared with digg. If you only want to read random shit written by monkeys digg is unbeatable, slashdot should be different
If you would look at the submitter's text, and the fact that the submitter's URL is .be, it might occur to you that the submitter isn't a native Engish speaker, and figure he made a simple mistake. In fact, you might even surmise that the submitter is Belgian, and would therefore not be likely to be confused about what languages are spoken in Belgium.
Even if you're going to be a pedant, in the sentence "Will Google become irrelevant in Belgian, and be replaced by MSN?", 'Belgian' could just as easily be read as a mistaken use of the adjective form instead of the noun form, i.e. "Will Google become irrelevant in Belgium...".
And I sometimes wonder about the average /.er's grasp on basic logic and common decency.
-Esme
'Dutch'?!?! Don't the Dutch speak Hollondaise?
You mean I can't read earth-shattering news exclusively put on french-speaking, .be domains anymore? Whatever will we do now? Dear Jesus.. how will I survive when such a huge part of the internets has been torn away? How many tubes are left, oh harsh harsh world?
In all seriousness, I didn't know the french-speaking press of the Belgian world was so damn stupid. Most of their traffic probably comes from people accidentally clicking on links from google. Why would they do this? Money?
That's like kidnapping Dubya in Egypt and asking the Arabs for a ransom.
Actually, I submitted the story, previewed it, to only discover later that I typed 'Belgian' instead of 'Belgium'. Sorry for the confusion. Sorry also if the text was not clear. Wouldn't it be good if there were any editors at Slashdot to correct obvious mistakes? ;) And yes, I'm not a native english speaker. Thanks for defending me!
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I've started using RSS feeds instead of going to multiple sites for my news. I don't want to rely on a single outlet for my news, and at the same time, I would like to be able to choose which feeds I get. I just go to my rss reader and grab all the feeds I want.
Google will not become irrelavant, if they are smart, because they have an online rss reader - Google Reader. It's still under "Google Labs", but if they started pushing this service where the news organizations are not allowing them. They could still pick up the ad revanue, and with less effort on their part.
Apparently, they have ordered these large fines thanks to the attitude of Google.
;"
;"
;"
For example, google wasn't present in court and they didn't collaborate at all in the investigation.
So the newspapers won by default. Google "indifferent" attitude apparently annoyed the court, so they basically granted the demands of the newspaper.
For some reason that part isn't translated in the english version of the court document, but here it is (in French - quoted from the court documents) and a rough translation, done by myself, follows each quotes:
1."Attendu que le tribunal de céans ne manque pas d'être
surpris par l'attitude de la défenderesse qui n'a pas jugé utile
de participer à' la mission d'expertise, malgré les invitations
qui lui avaient été adressées par l'expert judiciaire, et qui ne
comparaît pas
Translation:
The court is surprised by the attitude of the defendant which hasn't
found useful to participate in the expert evaluation[...]and who
aren't present in court.
2."Attendu que cette attitude constitue une indication de ce que
les craintes que nourrit la demanderesse sur la mauvaise
volontk que mettra à la d4fenderesse à s'exécuter pourraient
être fondées
Translation:
This attitude is an indication that the fears of the plaintiff
about the bad faith of the defendant might be justified.
3."Que l'attitude de la défenderesse est d'autant plus
surprenante que dans d'autres pays, cettes plus importants
que la Belgique, la défenderesse s'est engagée dans des
négociations avec les 4diteurs de journaux pour résoudre la
question du respect des droits d'auteur
Translation:
That the attitude of the defendant is more so surprising
that in other countries, certainly bigger than Belgium,
the defendant had been negociating with newspapers editors to
solves the copyrights and intellectual properties issues.
Also, the court order isn't just about the Soir Libre newspaper, but about all newspapers editors, journalists, etc represented by cafepresse.
First of all : it is pretty complex to explain our Belgian laws to you.. but I'll try! If you read the complete text there are several important points : - first of all Google wasn't in the courtroom to defend themselves, this leaves a whole procedure open for them to react. (but do they care?) - your robot.txt makes no sense here, that's an opt-out. In Belgium everything has to be opt-in. - all newspapers are strong entities in Belgium, nobody searches them in Google, everyone just types the newspaper name, followed by .be
- the main argument was brought to the judge by a court expert. They
did some tests by removing articles on some newspaper websites (for example : wrong info,
re-edited articles) but Google News would still show them.
This is a major issue here. You have to know we have a special database law (1992)
in Belgium. This law prohibits the commercial use, non-commercial transaction of databases
between entities and.. the creation of a database (whatever data) without the explicit knowledge
of those who are "databased"..
For the judge it was clear that Google made a "database" of the articles - so case closed.
(although i think "google cache" is not the same as "a database")
As a Belgian I'm proud we have the strongest privacy laws in the world (really, study them..),
but the database law is now used in a copyright infringement suit.
(where in the past, it was mainly used to protect individuals)
Besides of all these things : we still are slammed with arguments like "google making money with the news".
But everyone can see there are no ads on news.google.be
For your info : the flemish part of the belgian newspapers just asked
Google not to be indexed, and Google had no problem with that.
In my opinion and after reading the verdict several times,
Google would win the case with just a 0 sec. cache
If nothing happens in Belgium - why did Caesar call us the bravest?
Everone knows that Belgium doesn't exist...
From a quick glance at the ruling on chilling effects, the defene google put together (citing copyright law, database laws, etc) was not valid.
The ruling specifically talks about google's "cache". This would include the search cache.
In other words, they probably have good legal advice to remove these sites from the search cache (not just news) because these companies would be able to sue them again with exactly the same complaint for having their content in the search index.
It would be a legal liability to keep them in the search index.
There's only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people's cultures ... and the Dutch.
Hercule Poirot
Damn Flanders! They've been rubbing it in our noses since we got here! Their families are better than our families, their beer comes from farther away than our beer, they like each other, their wives butts are higher than our wives butts! They make me sick!
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
escalating the issue to searching is really abusive
Why?
Google just got sued by these guys for indexing their site. When you lose a lawsuit with ignorant assholes (i.e. anyone running a business on the web who doesn't use robots.txt and then complains about being indexed), the safest thing to do is make completely sure there's nothing left by which they can leverage that lawsuit into something like a contempt complaint.
Of course, not being indexed by Google can apparently be the basis for a lawsuit, too. Damned if you do...
Log in or piss off.
Hmm. Another conspiracy by the evil cartographers? Did you know that more than 99% of all maps are made by cartographers? Definitely some sort of conspiracy going on here.
My blog
I believe they were only required to remove links from Google News, but for whatever reasons they decided to effectively eradicate the site from Google completely. Read into that what you will.
So you believe Google indexing has some value to this newspaper, yet they paid exactly nothing to Google for this service. It seems to me they have absolutely no claim. If I'm receiving free electricity but complain to the power company about the power lines on my property, I can't very well complain if they cut me off when they remove the lines.
This tagline is copyrighted material. Please send $10 for an affordable replacement.
I sometimes wonder about the average /.er's grasp on geography AND foreign languages.
I hate to tell you this, but Belgium is not a major country. Do you happen to know what languages are commonly spoken in Zaire or Kenya? Or what the different ethnicities of the people in Chile are? What languages are commonly spoken in India (all of them, please)? What are the common languages spoken in Liechtenstein and Monaco? These questions are akin to asking what languages are common in Belgium.
If we were talking about the UK, France, Germany, or Italy, you might have a valid complaint about people not knowing a little about what languages are spoken there. But I think it's quite acceptable for someone on a different continent to have to do some research to find out about tiny countries like Andorra, Luxembourg, and Belgium.